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No, high school biology is sufficient, get a good AP high school level biology textbook that covers the theory of evolution (make sure you understand this totally, through and through, no fallacies and misconcepts!!), genetics and genetic expression, some population genetics (concepts such as drift, linkage, epistasis etc), ecology and basic models such as lotka-volterra, and maybe knowledge of human bio, such as hormones and the functioning of various systems, e.g. reproductive system, circulatory. All this can be found in a good high-school level or AP level bio textbook. The "medicine core" or "human bio core" courses of whatever university you are in may help.

Once you join the anthro department, even one that is specifically dedicated to bio anth or evo anth like MikeWhalen's link in his post above, you will realise that the field is still too constricted and focused on excessively narrow, technical research questions; for true scientific breakthroughs and real insight and career progression a wider knowledge base in multiple fields is definitely necessary.

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"Which superman haplogroup is the toughest - R1a or R1b? And which SNP mutation spoke Indo-European first? There's only one way for us to find out ... fight!"

The Following User Says Thank You to Ryukendo For This Useful Post:

So, what should I do then? I have to choose between Bachelor's degree in General Anthropology (in our country, it is only single program) or Linguistics but you said that I sohuldn't study Anthropology by itself

Are you in Russia?

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"Which superman haplogroup is the toughest - R1a or R1b? And which SNP mutation spoke Indo-European first? There's only one way for us to find out ... fight!"

Talking more specifically, I am interested in Paleoanthropology. What can you say about this? Does it requires much of social science?
Yes, I am in Russia now but I can't get Bachelor's degree abroad, only if Master or PhD degree

Talking more specifically, I am interested in Paleoanthropology. What can you say about this? Does it requires much of social science?
Yes, I am in Russia now but I can't get Bachelor's degree abroad, only if Master or PhD degree

To be really honest, I am much more familiar with the American system, where it is unusual to start focusing on Paleoanthropology right at the beginning of your university career. This gives one time to be familiar with some of the human and social sciences before you start. I have two questions:

How prestigious is the university you are at, and will the paloeanthropology degree there in Russia be well-regarded overseas such that you have a spot?

What is the paradigm in anthropology in Russia at this time? Is physical anthropology still quite dominant there? Has EvoAnth established an academic or institutional presence?

My reply is that yes, paleoanthropology is certainly moving in the direction where much more social science is involved in answering questions, e.g. largest human cooperative group size and its changes in human evolution, trade-off between innovation in own brain vs copying from brains of others in social group and how this effects evolution of brain enlargement, effect of ostracism or punishment via killing of most dominant individuals in every group over long time-scales, why is meat shared but vegetable matter private to the family in most hunter-gatherer groups and was this always the case, payoff of language to tool-use transmission improvement etc. etc. At the same time, many new discoveries are made in just digging, and that requires less expertise, but still some, as e.g. the hunter-gatherer landscape of ancient man is turning out to be very complex and full of replacements and introgression from archaics and we have unanswered questions like, if hunter-gatherer replacements and expansions are so common why is only the ~70-50kya Out of Africa event the most successful one??? and so on.

Quoted from this Forum:

"Which superman haplogroup is the toughest - R1a or R1b? And which SNP mutation spoke Indo-European first? There's only one way for us to find out ... fight!"

I am going to get undergraduate degree in Russia because it is very hard to study abroad when you only finished school and your English is not very suitable for science. And money, almost all undergraduate students don't have funding. If we talk about PhD degree, of course I want to get it in Germany (Max Planck's school of Human evolution) or in the USA. I don't know much about Russian Anthropology.
I chose RSUH because only this university offers undergraduate program in General Anthropology (only General Anthropology, curriculum includes physical anth, social anth, history). Secondly, exams I've chosen (yes, in Russia you have to choose two exams except Russian language and Mathematics, and where you will study depends on subjects you've chosen, that's why I can't choose Biology for example. Biological programs in Russia require exams - Russian language, Biology, Chemistry; I've chosen history and English. RSUH program in General Anth requires History, English and Russian)

I see that its rank is 37 in Russia. Is this right? I suspect you will need to distinguish yourself on your CV and grades quite a bit given that ranking.

Phys Anth, Soc Anth, and so on will all be good, but it depends on how narrow the approach is going to be. I strongly recommend that, if you find the approach too narrow, you broaden your horizons by reading up on your own. Become an autodidact and teach yourself. Just a question on the syllabus, is the soc anthropology more dominated by the modernist, ethnographic type coming to terms with human diversity, or the postmodern narrative type? Also how much bio goes into the physical anthropology part?

The payoffs can to having a broad knowledge base be really large and you end up contributing to fields even as an outsider. I am currently working on 5 projects spanning Archaeology, Anthropology, Ancient DNA, Networks, Political Economy, cultural Economics, tracking cultural transmission in large-scale societies through DNA testing companies, and Sociology of Dating for example, and approached all these fields as an outsider who had to look for the prerequisite prof.

Send me a private message if you like, we can chat more there.

Last edited by Ryukendo; 02-01-2018 at 08:51 PM.

Quoted from this Forum:

"Which superman haplogroup is the toughest - R1a or R1b? And which SNP mutation spoke Indo-European first? There's only one way for us to find out ... fight!"